Women’s Lunch History of Political Thought Workshop (paper) March 2016

St John’s College, University of Cambridge, England

German Politics and the ‘Jewish Question’, 1914-1919

The First World War confronted German politicians with a range of unprecedented, vital
questions in the spheres of domestic as well as foreign policy. As the fortunes of war shifted,
so did borders, populations and national allegiances. In a period of acute and almost constant
political crisis, the German government faced issues concerning citizenship, minority rights,
religious identity, nationhood and statehood. My dissertation analyses these issues through
the prism of the so-called ‘Jewish Question’. The Jewish Question, I contend, casts important
new light on Germany’s difficult path towards a new democratic and pluralistic constitution
in 1919. Jewish questions revealed the paradoxes of German state-building and the difficulties
of breaking down older forms of corporate identity for the sake of national-cultural
homogeneity. My principal aim in this dissertation is to offer a novel interpretation of the
role that the ‘problem’ of German Jewry played in the political debates and decisions that
paved the way for the Weimar Republic. The relevant historiography still tends to read the
Jewish Question with hindsight, that is, in the context of the Holocaust and from a social or
cultural historical perspective. While it does not ignore the short- and long-term effects the
Jewish Question had on the rise of German antisemitism, my dissertation stresses its
contingency and ambivalence. It offers the first sustained examination of the ways in which
questions about German-Jewish citizenship and religious as well as national identity shaped
the politics of the last Imperial government and influenced the processes of
parliamentarisation and democratisation in the final years of the war. The Jewish Question, I
argue, affords revealing new perspectives on the difficult birth of the Weimar Republic.